BJP’s land reforms and the shifting political landscape in Kashmir

The year 2023 began with one of the largest government-led "anti-encroachment" drives in Jammu and Kashmir. It was supposed to retrieve 1112.8 square kilometres of "occupied" land (almost five times the area of the capital city of Srinagar), which the government claimed was owned by the state. The campaign wreaked havoc among the locals and was eventually halted for what the state authorities described as a "consolidation" of actions so far. These actions included tearing down residential and commercial buildings and clearing apple orchards owned by locals. Although the federally-appointed lieutenant governor of Jammu and Kashmir said that only influential people who had grabbed state land by misusing their power would be targeted by the drive, he also directed the officials not to target "poor and common" people. However, no official order was passed in this regard to define who would be protected from the eviction drive. Further, news reports suggested that small-time shopkeepers, businessmen and others also faced eviction by bulldozer. The giant machines, that have become symbolic of the Bharatiya Janata Party's rightwing politics across India, are used to raze properties owned by Muslim activists and protesters who are critical of the regime. While the large-scale demolition drive in what was until 2019 India's only Muslim-majority state has been temporarily stopped, what it symbolises runs deep into the new political structure of Jammu and Kashmir; it resurrects a century-old monarchical system based on economic dispossession and cultural erasure.

BJP negating Jammu and Kashmir's land reform history

Until the mid-1900s, most Kashmiri Muslims were landless farmers who did not have ownership rights over the land they cultivated. The jagirdari system, established by the Maharaja Hari Singh's Dogra dynasty, would often coerce the landless Kashmiri population into forced labour and impose exorbitant taxes on their harvest. After the Hindu monarch signed the instrument of accession with India, Sheikh Abdullah, a socialist Kashmiri leader, was elected the prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir in 1948. Abdullah implemented a slew of reforms to abolish the feudal jagirdari system, enacting a land ceiling law that redistributed thousands of acres of land to landless farmers. The "land to the tiller" movement established him as the region's undisputed leader and created a welfare state that sought to reverse the effects of century-old Dogra rule. Over the next few years, initiatives such as the "grow more food" policy encouraged people to cultivate state land to increase agricultural production. Later, in 2001, the Roshni Act, formally called the Jammu and Kashmir State Land (Vesting Ownership to the Occupants) Act, was passed to grant ownership rights to people residing on state lands.